Far, Far Away

Albert Goodwin excelled at the depiction of twilight and sunset. Having been a pupil of Arthur Hughes and Ford Madox Brown, he was introduced by the former to Ruskin, Turner's champion and apologist. Like Turner, Goodwin was preoccupied with the fall of light, and, in common with his continental counterparts, exhibited an impressionist concern for capturing 'the moment'. However, while Turner's palette was predominantly yellow, Goodwin, writing in his diary of 1913, was keen to exploit 'the grey that acts as background, to bring out, and make more emphatic the colour. In [the] splendour of a gorgeous sunset one sees the scarlet, orange, crimson, vermillion, and does not - as a rule - notice the foil of grey, that frame these gorgeous tints and bring them out for our delectation'. Writing of two unidentified sunsets executed in the same year, he notes: 'though I have taken out most of the scattered colour, the points, by this, get their due and the whole thing, though with far less real colour, looks as though it had far more, and is doubly brilliant'.

Although Goodwin travelled widely, in Europe, India, Egypt and the South Sea Islands, he is not likely to have painted this from life in 1913. However, as he wrote in his diary of 1 December 1917, 'often the memory makes the scene a better one than the first experience'.

Goodwin exhibited at the Royal Academy, and became an associate of the Old Watercolour Society in 1871, becoming a full member a decade later. Although initially he worked in oil, towards the end of his career he worked almost exclusively in watercolour.